1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to sports equipment and more particularly to an improved archery bow assembly employing an automatically disappearing arrow rest.
2. Prior Art
The sport of archery has undergone substantial changes in equipment in recent years. Improved technology has permitted the use of space age materials such as carbon fiber cloth, graphite fiber cloth, advanced plastic sheeting materials and the like. One of the major advances has been in the archery arrows. Up until a few years ago, most target archery arrows have been made of high tensile strength aluminum alloys. Carbon cloth arrows began to supplant aluminum arrows because of the lighter weight and bend resistance of the carbon cloth arrows, which resulted in faster arrow speeds and flatter arrow trajectories, effectively increasing the target area and improving target scores. Carbon cloth arrows, however, were very expensive and easily damaged.
The newest archery arrow technology employs arrows using thin hollow aluminum cores overlaid with carbon cloth ,thus combining the strength and damage resistance of aluminum arrows with the lighter weight ,faster arrow speed and improved accuracy of carbon cloth arrows. Such arrows are of much smaller diameter than conventional all-aluminum arrows and bend less ( archer's paradox) when shot from an archery bow. Therefore, they present a problem of how to clear the arrow rest in the bow window without striking the rest and thereby losing speed and accuracy.
Disappearing rests have been used as a means of providing the necessary arrow clearance. One such rest employs a magnet to hold a thin wire ,upon which the arrow rests, in place. When the wire is struck by the arrow as it is shot, the wire pivots out of the way. This is not satisfactory because of the great arrow speed, which results in some arrow damage and some deviation from the desired arrow flight path due to the strike.
A substantial advance in the disappearing arrow rest art is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,953,521. Thus, that patent shows a rest which has a pendulum which must be reset or cocked after each shot. When an arrow is shot from a bow in which the rest is installed and cocked, the bow vibrations during shooting cause the pendulum to move forward to the uncocked position, allowing a spring to instantly draw the arrow rest toward the sidewall of the bow defining the arrow window and thus out of the flight path of the arrow.
Unfortunately, this rest is expensive to make and requires, as indicated above, resetting for each shot. When the rest is used for hunting this can be a distinct disadvantage, since it may be necessary to fire several arrows rapidly at a target to assure a kill. Moreover, in the heat of competition in target archery, the recocking procedure is a nuisance and serves to distract the archer from the concentration necessary for optimum results.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved arrow rest which will permit proper clearance for an archery arrow passing through the bow window and will not involve recocking for reuse. Such rest should be inexpensive, durable, simple and efficient and equally useful for hunting and for target archery.